Antipassive Constructions in the Maya Glyphic Texts

The Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts of the Southern Lowlands provide morphological and syntactic evidence for antipassive constructions. Two sets of signs, wa/wi and ni, are involved in the relevant spellings, probably rendering suffixes of the shape -(V)w and -(V)n. These two suffixes are related to attested Tzeltalan and Ch’olan antipassive suffixes, and they have ancestors reconstructible for proto-Greater Tzeltalan. Other Mayan languages outside Greater Tzeltalan also have cognate -(V)w and -(V)n antipassive suffixes. The proto-Mayan ancestors have been reconstructed as *-(V)w and *-(V)n (Smith-Stark 1978) or *-(o)w ~ *-(a)w and *-o-an ~ *-an (Kaufman 1986).